You have to be pessimistic when you read articles such as "Ecologists fear big rise in krill catch" (November 5).

The old saying that if you forget your history then you are condemned to relive it can seldom be held truer as the Norwegians aim to plunder the krill in the Antarctic.

Have they forgotten the damage that improved fishing technology did to the North Atlantic cod between the two world wars? The destruction was such that it has not recovered some 60 years later.

Now they have developed a fishing technique where bigger fishing vessels fish in tandem or threes so that the krill (and presumably anything hunting the krill, such as whales, seals and penguins) will not be disturbed by the sound of the engines.

Nets with mouths "hundreds of metres wide" can only spell devastation to the krill and the many species of fish, birds and mammals that live off them. How long will it be before we see the whale and penguin populations crash through the floor with little chance of recovery?

I am not a tree-hugging, vegan hippie/feral type who cares more about the rights of a malarial mosquito than those of a human being but that does not mean that I cannot see an environmental catastrophe coming when I see it.

Scientists only guess at the population of krill in the Antarctic and then have no idea how much of that is eaten per year by the krill's natural predators. They only seem to believe that if there is half a billion tonnes of krill then taking a million tonnes a year won't hurt.

What if the maths is wrong and a million tonnes of krill is all that is left after the whales, dolphins, seals, penguins, gulls, fish et al have had their fill?

Then the krill would be hunted below critical mass and would not be able to sustain populations of predators. The crash in the populations of the predators would create an extinction pattern in one of the most inhospitable environments of the world.

It would take millenniums for new species to adapt to the Antarctic environment. Please, for the love of humanity, stop this madness before it begins.

Ross Fyfe St Leonards